BizarreBehavior: Jails or Prisons? If we release all jails, 1/2 would be drug dealers, the other half would be piddly stuff like "i didnt pay child support" or "i like to dress up and go get rough with sheep" or "i had 423687 outstanding tickets" On the other hand, open the prisons up and you'll instantly turn America into a roasted pig with all the little wars that the violent bast's in prison would start.. But.. thats just one fellows opinion

I was watching a programme on 3 prisoners in Oklahoma who were all up for parole. Tow murderers and one man who stole some barbed wire. Guess which one didn't get parole? Yep, the guy who stole barbed wire was considered a greater risk or showed less change for the better.

I hear they don't have barbed wire in China so that must be the reason:-)

They specifically mention the source of the US figures but not those for the Chinese or Russian. Are they saying that the Chinese and Russian figures do not include all levels of incarceration. It's well known that neither of those countries like to disclose that sort of information.

oops...stupid IE..stupid Netscape for crashing and making me use IE...US population: 280,000,000Chinese pop: 1,300,000,000We totally kick ass in locking up more people than a totalitarian dictatorship. Go US!

Something else I think shouldn't be against the law here, besides drug usage, is prostitution. Selling is legal. Farking is legal. So why is selling farking illegal? You can do worse things to someone than giving them an orgasm.

Chinese "women over there pops out kids one after another"? No they don't. There's a national law that a couple cannot legally have more than 1 child. Any pregnancies with 1 living child are forcefully aborted even into the 3rd trimester.

Maybe America has a better justice system. More cops. Better cops. More arrests. Less criminals free. So this statistic is a good thing. I'm actually proud that we have more people in jail. That means there is a smaller chance of me being robbed or shot. And don't say they are wrongful arrests. That's bullshiat. There are probably a couple innocent people in jail, but if you get arrested, you're not the best person to begin with.

Plus, all the illegal immigrants come here because their countries are shiat, and end up committing crimes here.

Yeah, our government may have better things to put our police to instead of running over protestors with tanks (somebody was going to bring it up):P

There are two ways you can look at a stat like this:

1.) We have an effective policing system in the U.S. which China has yet to match. We catch more criminals than China does - this does not mean that we have more crime, we merely fight it better.

2.) We are a pool of filth that attracts criminals like a magnet. We should be more like big brother China and turn more into a facist society to better our ways - even if that does mean killing innocent people with opposing views along the way.

I doubt that we are a filth pool.. and I doubt we have the best policing system in the world. Somewhere in between is where we are. We are good enough to keep a lot of criminals off the streets, but still have more to put away.

Albert,OK, checked out the sites. Each one mentioned that China probably executed anywhere from 1263 to more than 4000 people per year.

"Catherine Baber of Amnesty International noted that China waged a previous Strike Hard in 1996, executing more than 4,000 people"

This still comes no where near the disparity in population imprisoned per capita.

China, with 1.3 billion people has 1.4 million in jail. The US, with 280 million, has 2 million in jail.

That's 0.7 percent of the US population in prison, and 0.1 percent of the Chinese population in prison. To equal our percentage rate, they would have to put another 7.8 million people in prison, or a total of 9.2 million people. I doubt that by executing even 5000 people per year that they are making up that 7.8 million people difference (it would take them 1560 years to do so).

How can anyone say what it is like in their prisons, you can imagine, but I have seen media of China's prison system and it isn't what is portrayed in peoples minds, but in reality they have a 2% recidivism rate with a focus on rehabilitation, not torture. In many south american countries the crime of rape gives the immediate family of the victem assasinate the attacker in any way deemed nesessary by the family, normaly they are tied to a tree and lit on fire slowly from their feet up. Not very many instances of rape occur in these cultures. I wonder why?

this reminds me of a stand up act i saw once. the comedian talked about how if he were about to be raped in a prison, he'd try to rape the person back. he then did a demonstration by running around in circles pretending to hold his package. funny stuff.

So you're saying that we should become a hard core machine gun toting dictatorship to lower our crime?The US could obviously lower its crime rate. Declare martial law to get rid of those pesky civil liberties, bring out Big Brother, throw another few percent of the population behind barbed wire, and I'm pretty sure we can get that crime rate down around zero. It did work for the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, a free society has to chose where to draw the line between safety and freedom.

I'm thinking that I would not want to be in a prison in any country, but the US prisons scare me more than most of the world's prisons. I would not be afraid of the guards or the warden, I would be afraid of the other prisoners. I've lived in Asia, and the people that inhabited their "bad" neighborhoods didn't scare me anywhere near as much as the the people that inhabit our bad neighborhoods. Of course, in third world countries you have third world prison conditions, which would also really suck. Bottom line, if you have to go to prison, go to prison in Europe (or North Dakota).